Event Detail

Mon Apr 29, 2013
370 Dwinelle Hall, 3:10–5 PM

Geoffrey Nunberg (UC Berkeley)Slurs aren’t special

How do derogative words come by their capacity to convey disparagement
and their expressive power to display emotion and inflict injury? In
recent years, a lot of people have come at these questions from the
points of view of philosophy of language, ethics, and linguistics,
sometimes with different agendas but always under the assumption that
derogatives have certain idiosyncratic properties that call for
specialized semantic features or mechanisms. I’ll argue for a minimalist
position: derogatives are ordinary vanilla descriptions, semantically
indistinguishable from their neutral or default equivalents. All of
their expressive effects arise from their association with discourses
or communities that are viewed as holding disparaging views of their
referents (like other terms that convey approbation and other
attitudes). In a nutshell, racists dont use slurs because they’re
derogative; rather they’re derogative because they’re the words that
racists use. The larger point: the lexicon is a sociolinguistic
construction, assembled out of the cross-cutting and complementary
conventions of a number of different communities and discourses.